One Question That Dramatically Boosts Happiness

We do not expect to hit life milestones—getting a promotion,
raising a child, running a marathon—without a fair bit of
gumption and at least a tentative game plan. But we often fail to
put the same amount of effort or planning into less tangible
goals—even important ones, like being happier. Why is this?

Philosophers and academics alike have long held that the
realistic, concrete steps that lead to achievement in other areas
of life simply do not work for happiness.
“What we predict will make us happy doesn’t always make us
happy,” explains Kelly Goldsmith, an assistant professor of
marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. And the very
things that everyone agrees might bring us happiness—good health,
for instance—are often hard for us to control. Yet, argues
Goldsmith, happiness is not an entirely futile pursuit; there are
life changes we can make to demonstrably improve our happiness.

A Fortuitous Disagreement

The line of research arose, surprisingly enough, from a friendly
disagreement between Goldsmith and her father, a successful
executive coach and a believer in the quantified life—“the idea
that if you monitor your progress toward your goals, you’re more
likely to achieve them,” says Goldsmith. Her father had become
convinced that regularly asking and answering the question “How
happy was I today?” had made him happier.

But Goldsmith
was skeptical. When we ask ourselves how happy we were today,
there is a risk we will wonder, well, how
happy should I
have been? And, as Goldsmith puts it, “the disparity between how
happy you think you should be and how happy you actually were
makes you sad.” Past research has borne this out: “In the
psychology literature there is [plenty] of evidence suggesting
that happiness monitoring actually has deleterious consequences
for your happiness.” However, Goldsmith did suspect that
rewording the question so that it focused on one’s own role in
being happy—rather than forces outside one’s control—might
mitigate some of the negative consequences.

So Goldsmith and her father embarked upon an extensive pilot
study to see which of them was correct. Hundreds of participants
from Fortune 500 companies were emailed one of three daily
questions: 1) a happiness monitoring question, “How happy were
you today?”; 2) a variant that focused on behavior, “Did you do
your best to be happy today?”; or 3) a control question that did
not mention happiness at all.

The father–daughter duo found none of the deleterious
consequences reported by other researchers: participants who
simply monitored their own happiness actually reported feeling
modestly happier several weeks later. But it was the variant that
focused on personal behavior that “really hit it out of the
park,” says Goldsmith. “So I was right, but my dad was also kind
of right, and the literature seemed kind of wrong.”

From Family Feud to Controlled Experiment

Would the happiness gains caused by behavior monitoring hold up
under more rigorous examination? And why hadn’t Goldsmith and her
father observed any negative consequences of happiness
monitoring? It was time, Goldsmith decided, to bring the research
into the lab. She teamed up with David Gal, also an assistant
professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, Raj Raghunathan, a
professor at the University of Texas, and Lauren Cheatham, a
graduate student at Stanford University.

The researchers decided to replicate the pilot study in a
better-controlled environment. Again, daily questions went out to
participants over email. And once again, participants who had
monitored their happiness for a few weeks reported very modest
happiness gains compared to participants who had not. But as
before the biggest boost in happiness—a boost the researchers
have since found in several other studies—came from receiving the
daily question about doing one’s best to be happy.

So why does receiving a daily question about happiness make us
happier? For one, it reminds us that we want to be happy. “We’re
bringing happiness up in terms of salience, making it more top of
mind for people,” says Goldsmith. “Throughout our day we make
trade-offs. Do I go to the gym or do I go to the movies with my
fiancé? Because I’ve got a goal of being a good partner, but I
also have a goal of working out.” And when goals conflict, “the
goals that are the most salient are usually the ones that we make
our trade-offs in favor of.”

This salience—particularly when the focus is on what we
are doing to become happier—leads to changes
in behavior. In another, similar study, the researchers
determined that 38% of participants who made behavior changes
focused more on positive events in their life, 16% made an effort
to have positive interactions with others, 9% engaged in
productive activities, and 9% simply worried less. Interestingly,
nobody reported buying things to make themselves happier.

As for the lack of negative consequences of happiness monitoring,
the researchers suspect that the longer duration of their studies
is to thank. Previous research had only looked at the effects of
monitoring over very short periods of time—sometimes as short as
the length of a song. But five minutes is simply not enough time
to make the kind of behavior changes that lead to gains in
happiness.

Small Changes, Big Implications

Importantly, it is not just happiness that can be boosted by a
daily prompt. Other behavior-focused questions like, “Did you do
your best to have positive interactions with others?”, “Did you
do your best to set goals today?” or “Did you do your best to
make progress toward your goals?” can also be effective. This
should interest firms wanting to increase employee productivity
and engagement. Instead of asking an employee once every six
months how engaged she is with her firm, the researchers
recommend, a manager might send a daily prompt like, “Did you do
your best to be engaged with the firm today?”

So how can we add this daily introspection to our lives? A
Post-it note on the computer is one option, as is a peer coaching
system where friends (or strangers) commit to call or email each
other with a daily question. Goldsmith, Gal, and their colleagues
are also collaborating with a website called AskMeEvery.com,
which emails interested parties a daily question of their
choosing. Responses are recorded so that users can hold
themselves accountable.

But, such a plan is not for the faint of heart. We have to be
able to handle the fact that most days we do not do our best to
be happy, says Goldsmith. This makes daily introspection
humbling—not unlike stepping on a scale. It should also go
without saying that a daily reminder to prioritize happiness is
not going to be sufficient to steer someone away from the brink
of depression. Still Goldsmith wholeheartedly recommends the
practice. “We all want to be happier,” she says, “and if there’s
something so simple we can do every day to improve our happiness,
it’s a big deal.”